Visualization of river surfaces is an important topic in computer graphics because rivers are present in many natural scenes. Although many conventional techniques have been developed for river simulation and rendering in the film industry, these techniques are only appropriate for off-line rendering of animated sequences. Real-time applications such as games typically model a conventional river surface as a texture mapped plane with simple lighting effects, while realistic wave geometry and sophisticated lighting effects are ignored. Conventional methods for graphically providing river scenes are often merely derived from modified photographs, as in the case of many flight simulators, or the river simulations are laboriously constructed by artists who manually create river graphics—literally by hand—for storage and later retrieval during a game.